Amount of milk?? Nursery, home, food.... arrrhhhh HELP!

[DrJen]

DS is 8months & on the 2nd centile.
He's been EBF until we started BLW at 5.5months (we started loosing food & he's taken to it really well)

I went back to work at beginning of August & DS is in nursery fulltime from 8.30 - 5.45pm.
I'm expressing once at work so he's having expressed milk in a bottle at nursery!

So far so good..... but now things started to get muddled and we don't know what to do!!!!!!!

How much milk?
We started nursery with 120mls and he was taking the lot. But he's settled in nursery well and eating all their food.

He's still not sleeping - and waking 2x night and needs feeding. (originally thought it was comfort off me, but can take 120ml from a bottle!)
So we tried increasing his milk at nursery to 3x150mls (as people have suggested he's hingry)
Sometimes he'll have the lot - othertimes he leaves about 20ml in bottle.

And..... still no sleep.

Just to add to our anxiety - eats great at nursery - started to notice that he's not having as much at home!

To add another problem..... I'm only managing to express 200mls at work in a day. So although we have a freezer stash, its slowly running out! Dont' want to use formula (had probs getting BF started and want to continue)

However over a weekend or a day off - my supply is enough for him all day.

Sorry about the length of this.... but really don't know what to do from here!

HELP please.

I think you might be overthinking this, but it's totally understandable, I was the same

Eventually dd and I got it down to the following

• I expressed as much as I could every work day
• sent all of that to nursery the next day, split into 3 equal feeds (of whatever size)
• offered breakfast and supper at home
• but didn't stress if she wasn't interested in them
• fed her as much as she liked all night

I suppose it helped that dd was a chubster sturdily built and I was never really worried about her weight but so long as your ds is sticking to his centile and not falling steeply away from it then I don't think you should worry either. After all, the very definition of the centiles is that there will be some on each one!

fwiw babies that start nursery often go through a phase of reverse cycling - it does pass eventually...